Micromax takes the crown of largest smartphone seller in India, leaves Samsung behind

Over the past few years, the smartphone market in India has shown great promise, with only the last quarter recording a sale of 21.6 million devices, a whooping increase of 90 percent from the same time a year ago.

Specially in the past year, the Indian Smartphone market saw a slew of high-end smartphones which surprisingly were light on the pockets as well. The reason being various home-grown brands such as Micromax, Lava, etc, which have increasingly been giving Giants such as Samsung and Nokia a run for their money.

In what is a first by an Indian Company, Micromax Informatics Ltd added another star to its belt by becoming the top smartphone seller in India surpassing Samsung Electronics Co. in India with the company recording its worst quarterly profit in two years.

According to a report by research firm Canalys, local manufacturer Micromax became the ace player in the smartphone market with sales around 22% of the total, leading its nearest rival Samsung by 2%, selling a staggering 4.6 million devices in the process.

Other Indian Manufacturers such as Karbonn and Lava were not far behind landing spots in the top 4 with record sales.

According to another such report Indian brands together captured more than two-thirds of the total mobile phone shipments and more than half of the smartphone shipments.

Though not many people outside India may have heard of Micromax because of its low overseas presence but turns out that the six year old company had clout enough to take on and beat a mobile behemoth on its home ground.

The main reason which propelled it to the top was its understanding of the local markets . The average Indian consumer has always been price conscious as reflected in reports according to which nearly a quarter of all devices sold were priced at under $100 whereas devices in the $100 to $200 class amounted to 41 percent of all sales. This is where Micromax capitalized providing a stream of feature rich budget smartphones.

All in all Samsung gotta roll up its sleeves, if it hopes to reclaim the crown of largest smartphone seller in India from Micromax, which seems all set to live up to its motto, “Nothing like Anything”.